Portrait of a Village: the People of Kryvorivnya Ukraine (1992 – present)

I chronicle communities through portraiture. Much of my work is done in Eastern and Central Europe and in immigrant enclaves in the United States.

For more than 20 years, I have photographed in the village Kryvorivnya in Western Ukraine. In the early ‘90sI portrayed many of the village’s 2,000 inhabitants with the idea of creating a composite portrait of this community through individual portraits of its members.

Recently, some two decades later, I returned to continue photographing the people and places I portrayed previously. The series has evolved into a multilayered community portrait that now includes the notion of cultural persistence and change through the passage of time.

I first came to Kryvorivnya in the early ‘90s, shortly after Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union. Despite never having been there before the place didn’t feel unfamiliar. In my childhood growing up in the United States the environment had been described to me in detail by my parents. I grew up in a refugee family that was forced to leave Ukraine when it fell under Soviet rule. Through my photographs, I want to confront the image built up from the recollections of my parents with one of my own.

Evdosia Sorochan, a former political prisoner, spent 10 years in forced labor camps. She dug uranium ore with her bare hands. Evdosia asked to be photographed in a replica of her former prisoner’s “robe”, 1996 (left). Evdosia Sorochan, former political prisoner, 2014 (right).